A blow to human rights
By now, U.S. President Donald Trump has more or less lost the ability to shock.
It’s been clear for some time that almost nothing is too coarse or outlandish for him to say, no place or person — be it standing in front of a CIA memorial, or speaking to Boy Scouts — immune from his delusions, deceits and self-exaltations.
What Trump has not lost is the ability to appall. He did so again Wednesday by banning transgender Americans from service in the country’s military in any capacity, turning back hard-won progress in human rights.
The United States is hardly alone in having subjected LGBTQ soldiers to witch-hunts, abuse, discrimination and purges over the decades. In Canada, too, men and women were hunted out and driven from the service on the basis of sexuality and gender identity.
But the world, if slowly, changed. Last year, under President Barack Obama, 25 years after the Canadian military lifted its ban on transgender people and had an estimated 200 in the ranks, the U.S. military similarly opened its doors.
In Trump’s America, those doors are being summarily slammed shut.
“Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail,” Trump said in a tweet. Fitting protest — and revulsion — soon followed. Ashton Carter, defence secretary under Obama, said in a statement that what matters in choosing service members should only be qualifications. “To choose service members on other grounds than military qualifications is social policy and has no place in our military. There are already transgender individuals who are serving capably and honourably. This action would also send the wrong signal to a younger generation thinking about military service.”
Former Sgt. Shane Ortega, the first transgender soldier in the U.S. military to go public, was less diplomatic. “Trump is a man who is literally a war-dodger, who comes from a life of privilege and silver spoon, who has no connection to reality whatsoever,” he tweeted
In the president’s pinched vision, it seems there is nothing more useful than some “other” to vilify. Transgender soldiers have been added to a long list of categories of humankind — Mexicans, Muslims, media etc. — that Trump and his supporters disdain. Vice-President Mike Pence, an ardent Christian who opposed Obama’s repeal of the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in 2010 and as governor of Indiana opposed a federal directive on transgender bathroom use in schools, had reportedly been campaigning for such a move.
There was also speculation that such an emotional wedge issue would be useful to Republicans in the 2018 elections, obliging Democrats, if so inclined, to take up an argument on behalf of transgender people that might not play well in Rust Belt states.
As for Shane Ortega, a former helicopter crew chief in the army’s 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii, he might just have been the subject of one of the best openings in 21st-century journalism when he was profiled by reporter Juliet Eilperin in the Washington Post two years ago: “Over the past decade, Sgt. Shane Ortega has served three combat tours: Two in Iraq, one in Afghanistan. Two as a Marine and one in the Army. Two as a woman and one as a man.”
If only Donald Trump had a fraction of such service, courage and commitment to freedom on his resumé.